Real as it seems
by Crimson-Eyed-Angel99
Summary: Completed - I don't remember leaving the dark. You'd think you would, you know, after wandering around, tripping over who-knows-what for His-Ratness-knows how long, you'd think I'd recognize light when it came. But this world is stranger than most.
1. Chapter 1

I don't remember leaving the dark.

You'd think you would, you know, after wandering around, tripping over who-knows-what for His-Ratness-knows how long, you'd think you'd realize when you'd emerged into light.

The darkness just started to creep away, tucking its tail (funny, I thought I cut that off) between its legs and tentatively backing up. I can smell, rather than see, light making its entrance.

Oh, it's nothing like Sora's light. God forbid I have _that_ blinding monstrosity make an appearance here. No, I get crouching, creeping light that glimmers in the way the light in the bathroom does.

Bright enough to show you where you _should_ be going, but dim enough that you piss all over the seat and your sister yells at you in the morning.

Not that I had a sister.

A couple steps forward and water splashes beneath my feet. As a reflex, I look down and see-

Nothing. I've still got a blindfold on. Big surprise there. I reach up to pull the thing off, just for a moment, it's not like Sora will jump out to yell 'ANSEM EYES!' or… whatever I believed he and Kairi would do if I _didn't_ wear it. The world shades itself into focus like an etching, the blurry textures becoming more solid.

Man, those were fun as a little kid. Running around with a piece of charcoal and paper, imprinting everything on it from palm trees to Sora's shoes. We had to work hard to get that last one; the idiot kept moving and I practically had to staple his Restless-Leg-Syndrome-prone ankle to the ground to get the etching of his shoe. And Kairi was standing there, giggling the whole time, putting her hand up to her mouth to cover it.

How the heck does a twelve-year old know how to be _coy_? They're supposed to just have trouble realizing guys are not girls at that age, aren't they? Bloody…

The world has shaded itself now, becoming grey and black with white pinpoints of light glowing like the lights of Disney Castle. I've gone bloody monochrome. Fantastic.

…and, apparently, insane.

Wheeled metal surrounds me.

A deranged form of heartless? A _failed _form of heartless? None of them move even though I'm right in the middle of them, fully within range of attack. No bloodthirsty breathing, no tear of claws on ground like I've grown used to. May as well shoot a spell at them—

Wow. This is heavier. The dim light reflects off the keyblade brighter and it feels heavier, more solid and real than before. It always weighs next to nothing when it's summoned… it's because I'm the true keyblade master, it _should_ be light!

--maybe this is what it's like for those who try to take Sora's keyblade from him? It's so heavy they can't hold it? Bugger that, this isn't Sora's, it's _mine!_ This doesn't even make sense! If Sora made my keyblade somehow heavier as some kind of joke, I swear, I'll rip his—

Or I could just rip the pseudo-heartless apart. That's what I'm good at.

The thing utterly fails to balk and run when I approach it. The sign of either a strong heartless or a stupid one. Two seconds later, when my slash-and-kill lust is temporarily satisfied and it looks like the wrong end of a Heartless ship against Sora's trigger-happy Gummi finger, I decide to opt for the latter.

The other wheeled metals still haven't moved, even though the one I destroyed is letting out a pitiful wail. One more good whack and the sound dies.

Well, that accomplished _silence_, but I was hoping for a bit more than that.

Aren't there more heartless? This is starting to get to me… there must be heartless. This is just a different area of Kingdom Hearts after all; it's not as if…

With a black squiggle and a poof, one wriggles its way out of the ground. Tightening my grip on the keyblade's hilt, it's all I can do to stare.

It's _different_.

The body is rounder, sleek and black and _round_ like a… like something I don't know, this hasn't happened before! Its claws gleam sharply and the sudden notion that they can actually rip and tear yanks on the light switch in my head.

There can be blood here.

Heh.

But when has that bothered me? Leaping in, I thrash the black head from the shoulders and it poofs and vanishes as it dies. Riku triumphs again! My ego is restored and the keyblade dissolves. Funny how it knows when to do that… I know I don't tell it to but it just _does_. Maybe there's a counter somewhere that assesses how many heartless were there when it showed up and how many bashes it takes to kill them.

But using that logic, it should have disappeared in the middle of every boss battle I ever fought. And what about Ansem, who never really dies? Never mind.

The quiet here is eerie. Now that the metallic wail has died and the heartless vanished, the lights' humming becomes audible. The last time I heard that was in Traverse Town, near the electric wires powering that pointless giant star. Upon closer inspection, these lights have that same strange roundness. A solidity.

Do I have it too?

A mirror, need to find a mirror… I'm not Kairi, can't pull one out of thin air and check my hair like she did when we were kids. Man, she loved that little golden hand-mirror until Sora broke the clasp being dumb. How can such an idiot get the girl? Constantly running around, saving the world, and yet he can come home to a girl whose hand mirror he broke trying to find out how many times he could open and close it in fifteen seconds.

…never mind the fact that I was the one timing him.

Light bounces off the shop windows. Funny, they never seemed so glassy before… the reflection is like staring into a lake.

Hook's croc!

Is that me?

Wow. I have to lean closer to get a better look. Never mind the fact that I haven't seen myself or much of anything for a long time… I'm sure I wouldn't look like this. The black-clad, glaring, Ansem-eyed man (wasn't I a teen when I slammed the door? Fourteen… how old am I now?) staring out with that perplexed, fingers-just-slammed-in-the-door expression is definitely me but…

The man fingers the end of his long silver hair and my glove grates across the individual pieces. Strands of silver hair gleam brightly against the black fingers of my gloves. Now, I know I have strands of hair. Everyone has strands of hair, even crazy Sora, though his like to defy gravity. But… I've never felt them before. Never seen them _individually _before.

It's weird. Hair is supposed to come in clumps, clusters of hair, pointed and unmovable. Well, of course they move when I fight but _come on_, hair is clustered. But mine has… come apart? The hell?

I'm not Sora. I don't need hair gel to make my hair be "normal" in the morning. I'm actually one of the few who knows the three bottles of Cid's SuperTastic Hair Potion he uses every morning, the sneaky fop. Of course, he's the only one who knows I roll out of bed looking like Sephiroth and have to viciously comb my bangs out of joint to lose that. It was why I kept my hair so short before slamming the door and losing all access to scissors forever. (The keyblade can't cut, it merely bashes)

Now I'll be lucky if people don't start screaming for certain blonde mercenaries and start looking for black Materia in the sky when I walk up.

But aside from the hair… I look rounder as well, in the same way as the heartless. This is odd, since I should be emaciated. The main fare in Kingdom Hearts is Heartless and well…

The one time I tried to cook a Heartless, it tasted like… eating Maleficent's cooking. The witch doesn't (or didn't, she's dead now if I remember right) know any methods of cooking something other than deep fat frying it (and Hook was always complaining about finding his hair care bottle missing after she cooked, so I can guess where she found her grease) or magicking it (the last time she tried _that_, we had to force feed it to one of the Behemoths… I'm under the impression that was the only reason Sora could beat it.). So her cooking always turns out slippery and greasy. Eating it is like swallowing a moray eel that's been swimming in toxic waste.

Puking is mandatory.

Heartless, both for memories of Maleficent and for tasting like they'd been bathed in Pete's armpits, were immediately nixed from the menu and their nixing put a new vigor into my killing them.

So, I survived in Kingdom Hearts, which I'm starting to realize _isn't here_, by scraping moss off rocks and drinking from running streams. I don't know where the streams came from and I don't know how the moss grew where there is no light, but I do know that both tasted awful.

I peer into the window and spot rows of things. Knickknacks? It looks like the kind of store Kairi could spend a day in, rows of wooden clocks, sculptures, teapots, candlesticks… rather like the Beast's Castle actually.

If I ever get back, I'm going to take her to that refuge of living cutlery. Just to see her face when the candlestick starts dancing around and she gets served dinner by perpetually grinning plates, spoons, teacups, and gravy boats. Kairi would love it.

Sora would probably try to smash it though. The kid seems like he'd spaz if a frog jumps at him at the wrong time, I can't imagine what he'd do to dancing dishes who belt out showtunes at the drop of a hat.

As I remember, they didn't sing when I went there. Then again, I didn't sing while I was there either, so I guess that makes us even. My singing voice, Sora says, is like listening to a deep sea clam try to sing 'Hit me baby one more time' – physically painful and family-reunion-style embarrassing.

Of course, _he_ could sing it with the original feminine voice, the brat. That recording he did on Atlantica ended up echoing even into Kingdom Hearts. Now _that_ was physically painful. His voice probably still hasn't changed.

Now, to find some food… my stomach is throwing daggers at my brain with an unusual accuracy. Obviously, eating antiques isn't an option, so…

There has to be a shop, or something. Dragged on by hunger, I start peering into windows down the street as my feet carry me on who-knows-where. The sky is getting lighter. Morning?

It's been a while since I've seen those colors. You don't realize you're supposed to appreciate the reds, oranges, and purples until they're gone. The vantage point from my tree back on the Island was great, you could see everything on the horizon over the bright waves, but I didn't stare up often enough. Staring at the stars at night and trying to pick out which ones were planets was more routine.

Sunrises and sunsets were for Sora and Kairi. I know because after I would go home for dinner, they'd run out there and sit on the tree and hold hands and giggle like puppies.

You say puppies don't giggle but if you sat there, and you watched them, you would say that if puppies giggled, that's what they'd sound like.

Bloody… I'm on a tangent again.

Anyway, with morning approaching at his back, the valiant Riku strode gallantly down the street in search of sustenance (and food while he was at it) with his long-bloody-Sephiroth-impersonating-traitorous hair streaming down his back and making him look oh-for-crying-out-loud-so-freaking feminine and his long legs eating up the ground in his quest for food—

All right, there are some things you just shouldn't do in narrating your own story. I think I just got all of them into that sentence.

The sky's wrapped itself in light blues now and red is starting to shine with yellow, like blood staining an egg yoke. That was almost poetic, if it hadn't gotten disgusting at the end.  
Something always has to die in my metaphors.

This place appears to be bedecked in grey. Yes, I realize bedecked should be out of my vocabulary, but since there is just no other way to describe that nutcase Marluxia but 'bedecked in flowers', it's there legally. Marluxia isn't human.

Then again, technically, none of the Organization is, since they all just seem to be… undead. Apparently, you die and acquire hair that looks like you stuck your finger in a light socket while taking a bath. If looking like that clown Axel is death, I never want to die.

Back to the grey surroundings. The sky is light grey now, the colors having died out a while ago (possibly because of my bad metaphor, possibly not). There's a wind picking up and—

CLANGCLASHBANG!

--my first sign of life appears.

The person, or at least what I can see through flying papers, is scrambling around a pile of paper that just fell, making panicked noises and yelping words that I'm guessing aren't things you'd write in a letter home. Must be male by the voice. It's not my job to help clean up his mess so I just wait until he stops yelling and looks at me. He's shorter than I am. I can't help but wonder why he's up this early with a bunch of papers.

Absolute silence.

"Uh, hi."

Wow, my voice is rusty. Rusty and deep. I feel like a camel bleating out of a well. The person just blinks at me some more. Please tell me he doesn't think I'm Sephiroth…

"Nohabloengles!"

--and with that, he goes back to his job, as if everything should make sense to me now. I, being myself, stand there and wonder what the heck he just spouted. Does he have a strong accent or something? I always prided myself on being able to figure out what His Ratness said though that squeaky mouse voice of his and Ansem with his dual vocal chords (half of which were MINE) but this…

"You wanna repeat—"

"Nohabloengles!"

"Thanks, but that wasn't very—"

He stops and stares at me as if I'm retarded.

"No. Ha. Blow. In. Glayse."

"You. Are. A. Nut. Case."

We stare fixedly at one another like feral animals until he starts looking at me funny. This baffles me for a second before I realize what he's looking at.

Never get into a staring contest when you have orange eyes. It confuses the jeepers out of the competition and they'll keep staring, just because you're so weird.

Aiming for drama, pathetic though that may be, I whirl and stalk away. Unfortunately, my whirling brought me face to face with the rising sun and now I have to stalk away literally blinded.

Crap.

It's going to be a long day.

My feet kept dragging me on until I located a sizeable rock garden… thing, in the middle of the town hours later. Sitting there keeps me from wandering in circles, so on I sit. For hours. It's very dull.

I feel like I'm waiting for something. Nothing has struck me as familiar yet, just more wheeled metal, lack of heartless (though I did find that if I want one bad enough, I can summon one. They always look so pitiful and confused just before I kill them though… guilt isn't normal for me but it's drenching me here. Must be an aspect of the weird roundness), and no comfortingly familiar _food_.

I'm starting to believe I would marry the first girl who showed up with food. It would be bad for her of course, I'd be a crappy husband, but at least I'd have food. Until she left me anyway, probably for Sora.

Sora's probably proposed to Kairi now. If he hasn't… I don't know if I'll be pissed at him for not going back to her or glad because I'll have the opportunity first. _I_ could be the saving hero.

--After getting a haircut.

Kairi has expressed a definite disliking for Sephiroth and I don't want to show up looking anything like him.

"He's got white hair mommy!"

"Hush, it's not polite to point!"

Automatically, I turn towards the two voices. There's a teen mother and her kid walking by, the kid's hand wrapped around a red balloon that's tied to his wrist. He looks about four and he's only a little taller then a Moogle. Heh, midget.

"Hn." I make one of my famous Riku Noises of Contemplation (©) and the pair continues on. Of course, the mother can't resist sending a rather 'come hither' stare back my way when she thinks I'm no longer paying attention to them.

It's funny how many of those I get, and then lose out when they learn Sora's the one who saves the universe on a weekly basis. It's like being best friends with someone in the band.

Sure, your girlfriend likes you _now_, but all you can play is Stairway to Heaven on the banjo and here comes your best friend, having just perfected the guitar riff for 'Paralyzer' and whoops, there she goes, wasn't she hot though? How the heck did I end up Sora's roadie when I was supposed to be the lead singer in the band? With, of course, the band being saving the world, the girl being Kairi, and the songs being… I don't know, the bashing of heartless over the head with keyblades? Whatever.

Isn't there anyone in this town who is going to tell me what's going on? My patience is running thin and the unusual snappiness of my stomach is starting to develop claws. I don't remember it being this intense before… what does it matter?

Food isn't appearing and, while my attention span is a bit longer than Sora's ADD, _I'm getting bored_.

Sliding off my rock, I start wandering around the square. No food shops, just lots of colorful signs featuring a redhead with pigtails, what looks like a giant hat, and a evil-looking yellow 'M', none of which smell like food. Why can't this world be more like Traverse Town, where at least if you WANTED food, you knew to head for the area which the loose-looking woman (my mom always condemned calling anyone easy, but come on. She looks easy) hangs out in and there's a lot of tables and beer.

Then again, most people don't go to Traverse Town to eat if they're underage. Just look at how Leon turned out. The man can't be older than 30 and he looks like a hardcore biker. It defies explanation, except the influence of drink.

In any case, the return of my lack of food announces itself through my stomach. A man in coveralls and a frizzy head of hair the same color as mine looks at me oddly.

"You need food young man?"

Finally! Someone with sense! I nod, trying out the camel-from-the-well voice again. I knew I hadn't spoken in a long time but this is ridiculous. It comes easier this time though.

"Yeah, you want to tell me where to get some?"

The man gestures at the red-head with pigtails on the signboard.

"There's there-"

He points at the hat sign.

"There."

Then at the M.

"And there."

I stare at him, despite the orange eyes issue.

"Is there anywhere I can eat where I'm not a cannibal, hat-eater, or chow down on some M's? I'm HUNGRY, not crazy!"

I then notice that he's staring at my hand with a worrying attention. With a crackle of electric energy, my keyblade has decided I'm angry enough to warrant its appearance. Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, this terrifies my food-provider.

"I-I'll get you some food!" He babbles. I put the keyblade over my shoulder, out of his direct vision.

"Bout time."

Sora's the one who negotiates and apologizes and goes on 'Quests' for things, but Riku's the one who gets _results_. The man bolts into the redhead store and I sit down on the rock again. He's out again in five minutes, hands me a bag, and bolts. Now that he's gone…

It's a greasy bag. Nothing in the worlds I've been to was ever greasy, with the exception of more technical aspects of gummi building. What did he buy me? Is this even edible??

I stick my hand, wondering idly if I'm going to come out with the grisly remains of that redhead on the sign's head, or any other necessary body parts. Instead, I get a papery circle, that smells vaguely like food or at least something that was once food...

Unwrapping it increases the food scents and biting into the thing… well, it really obliterates all sense that this is actually food.

It's heaven.

I think I sat there with the thing in my mouth for a full minute, which is disgusting, but since I wasn't likely to get another one unless I rampaged in, I may as well savor it. Finally though, it's gone and time to investigate the rest of the bag.

Which has sticks of gold stuff, rather in keeping with the gummi motif. They're greasy and look like you could build something with them… I resist the urge though. Sora wouldn't have, I can just picture him now, in a golden stick fort. He'd be proud of it too, even though it just proves what a kid he is.

Of course, since I've had the impulse to build something too, that makes me almost as ridiculous…

Finishing off the golden sticks of potato, I have to decide what to do next.

This world is bigger. I don't think the world even has limits, I can just keep running and running, without any names of the places I'm running to appearing in the bottom of my vision. Strange as it sounds, that's usually normal. No Heartless pulling themselves out of the ground, even though those wheeled Heartless have people getting in and out of them with no apparent side effects. This is weird. On a comet-from-the-sky-two-Soras level of weirdness.

Where the heck am I?

(divider)

Sorry for my long absence... I only realized now that I hadn't uploaded this and probably should. XD This story is not yaoi and was actually inspired my Flaming/Frozen Shadows by Vixen (go reeeeeead itttt). Disclaimer is standard, I don't own Kingdom Hearts or Riku and no offense was intended at anyone Mexican, Spanish, or any other ethnicity that speaks Spanish. I simply needed someone to say something Riku couldn't understand and my Spanish is abyssmal. Therefore... yeah.

W00t, it sounds like we're going to be in for another thunderstorm here. Saweet.


	2. Chapter 2

That was the main focus of my thoughts for about the next… two minutes

That was the main focus of my thoughts for about the next… two minutes.

Really, how long can one wonder about things until you just get bored? I had no answers, and it didn't look like a dog and duck were going to show up babbling about some lost king to explain everything to be.

Then again, it had never looked that way for me.

Deciding it was easier to get a handle on things if I climbed to a higher place, I jumped on top of the redhead's building, using a handy wheeled Heartless for a springboard. It worked rather well, both as a springboard and an attack. The Heartless crunched and a large, unhealthy-looking dent appeared in the box's top.

Planting my butt down on the weird tiled roof of what passed for a restaurant here (there was a giant sign saying 'Wendy's' up there. I wondered who had done their advertising campaign because Wendy looked _nothing like that. _At least it was something to recognize), I looked over the city. You couldn't see much from here, but to sum it up in a few words…

Butt-ugly.

You'd think city-designers were aware of the basic color schemes, how to make everything blend and make the buildings at least remotely attractive but NO. Not here. Here, it looked like everything had been designed by different freaking people with all needing a slew of pills for their mental and artistic problems.

One building was white with blue trim, another yellow with red trim… and they were right next to each other. To say nothing of the buildings that lay all in one long strip like a turd, separated only by signs proclaiming what each did in, thankfully, more descriptive terms than the food eatery signs.

Not that I'm an architect, or ever wanted to be one, but it was hideous.

Except for the rock garden I'd rested in. That was well-designed, but even it stuck out like an Asian-inspired sore thumb in the midst of all this chaos.

I had to sit and stare for a moment. This had to be farther away than I'd ever imagined. Farther away than home was from Kingdom Hearts. Farther away than Kairi. I hadn't felt this blindsided since Sora showed up in a little hole called Traverse Town with the dog and the duck. Just seeing his blissfully smiling face then had stabbed at me.

We were rivals, sure, and rivals fought, but they needed to keep thinking about each other, let the drive to surpass the other person keep their spirits high and their hands on their weapons at all times.

Or everything would fall apart in an instant.

All of my everything had fallen apart in that instant, when Sora had grinned at me, not a thought of Kairi or beating me or getting back to Destiny Islands in his head. Just that key, which I wanted to smash through his head, just so I could shove the important things back into it. Riku brain surgery. No one survives.

I hadn't, obviously. For one, Maleficent would have had a fit. They _needed _him, far more then they ever really needed me.

Okay, main thing on the agenda, to find people who knew where this was. Despite the fact that I'd been up most of the night, sleep really didn't factor in as a priority. It never had, I just didn't get exhausted.

Riku has nerves of steel and an adrenaline power of 300. Always.

Landing on the ground after dropping off the roof came harder then it usually did though. Usually I could leap and glide gracefully to the ground, landing like the mini-Sephiroth I certainly looked like right now.

My landing now, in this world, was… a bit more awkward. I thunked against a dumpster and my ankles freaking reached up through my legs and BIT me, okay? It hurt. But if Sora could do this, I sure as hell could too.

Dragging my wounded ankles along (have you ever tried to limp with two legs? It's well nigh impossible), I quickly found what looked like a likely candidate for information about the world.

The guy was friendly-looking (which was always a minus in my book, per prior experience with doofy Sora, but friendly people were pro at getting information), wearing a 'Your mom's my narcotic' T-shirt, and a grin.

The grin disappeared when I walked up to him.

Time to try to use the Riku Persuasion powers again. Gritting my teeth, I curved my lips into a smile. This does not sound nearly as hard as it actually is.

"Hello. I'm interested in some information."

"H-h-h-h-h-"

I had found the one asthmatic friendly person in town. He started hyperventilating and looking around nervously, like Luxord in that _Guys and Dolls _world he'd once day-tripped to. I'll never forget the expression on that blonde gambling-addict's face.

It looked a like this guy's response to _me_.

"Yes, hi. Where am I?"

"C-C-C-"

My patience was like a dynamite pin. The slower you pull it out, the sooner the grenade is going to go off in your face.

"C-what? Castle? Disney Castle?"

The guy stared at me, then started to smile.

"You're a kidder!" He proclaimed happily and started to ease up, or at least his face started to return to the color it had been when I walked up.

"Nah, Disney Castle's in California. We're in Olympia. Ever heard of it?"

Other than it sounded awfully close to Olympus and the Olympic Coliseum… no. And judging by his reaction to Disney Castle, voicing either of those names would get a bad (or worse, giggling) reaction. Not that I harbored any great affection for the parliament of poultry and rodents myself, but they didn't make me _giggle_.

Unless I was trapped in a cave with one who kept calling me 'pal' and 'buddy'. But that would be another story. And if I did giggle at it, I would probably have to be high.

"No," I answered finally. "I've never heard of it."

"Well, we're the capital of Washington."

Another place I'd never heard of.

"--In the good ol' USA which I'm sure you know."

I didn't. Deciding to step out on a limb, I asked the question that made the man's jaw scrape the tops of his skuzzy sandals which, I noticed enviously, were about three sizes smaller than mine.

"But what world?"

Insert the jaw-dropping now.

"Wor—hey buddy, are you high or something?"

No, but I was starting to wish I was.

"What world?"

"Earth." He was giving me a look that said asking about what world we were on was not in the normal criteria. Obviously these people had never even thought about other worlds or visitors from them.

How closed-minded.

Dreaming about other worlds and people from other worlds was the only thing that had gotten me off that green collection of rocks we called Destiny Islands. Maybe, on the other hand, it wasn't so bad not to dream about other places then…

"Earth. Okay. Are there any--? No, I guess not." I was actually about to ask the guy if they had gummi ships here. With that reaction, was there any possible way they could? Better not to get myself locked up in a loony bin.

"Thanks, you've been a big help." I muttered, stalking away.

"Yeah, take care of yourself bro!" He called after me. I could feel people's stares turning my way.

So this was Olympia, in Washington, on Earth.

This was also certifiably insane.

This was worse than being lost in Kingdom Hearts (in which I was always lost. There's no map. There are no doors and no lights. Saying you know where you are is a boldfaced lie. Which makes His Royal Ratness one heck of a liar because every time I turned around he was going 'It's this way! I can tell!' How the heck could he tell? Neither of us had ever been there!).

I was alone in a world nobody had ever heard of, looking like a mini-Sephiroth-clone with orange eyes, and I had no idea how to get food other than threatening it out of people.

Oh, and I had no allies.

That was nothing unusual though. At least the animals here didn't appear to be the clothes-wearing, talking variety. Knowing my luck, I'd end up with a dung-beetle and a sloth. One would keep telling me I was full of crap and the other would be too dumb and slow to be any help in a fight.

Mentally, I added them to my party, at the same time making a mental note that I was going completely around the bend.

Sloth and Dung. Why be creative if they were imaginary?

All of the sudden, Sloth was beginning to sound pretty good though. Not to eat, obviously. I'm crazy but not insane. The _activity_ of sloth was beginning to sound appealing. There's an oxymoron for ya.

This Earth body got tired faster and, ever so slightly, was beginning to smell like sweat and darkness. Darkness has a scent, though most people don't know it. It smells like death and fear and dreadful hope all rolled into one evil festering mist. It's essentially what Heartless are comprised of and I shouldn't be surprised that it was practically dripping off me.

I needed a _shower_.

And thus began my next epic quest: The Adventure of Riku and the Search for a Hotel.

We never needed hotels at home.

I take that back.

When adventuring, I (and I assume Sora&Co) had never used hotels.

Oh sure, the ones in Traverse Town were good to bound through looking for treasures (I stole half of the treasures of every world I went to, just so Sora couldn't get to them. 'Ha ha!' I'd tell myself in that snarky evil voice I was so good at then. 'I've got those three Dalmatians now and you'll never get them! BWAHAHA!'. Eventually, I just returned the things to their parents. Dogs hate me.), but looking for treasures was all they were good for. When I was out there 'in the field', I slept in glowing portals that recharged your health, in gummi ships, during teleportation, and a couple times in a cage. That was Maleficent's idea. The witch was nuts. I don't think I've mentioned that. _Nuts_.

So, given my non-existent history with arranging lodgings, is it any wonder that I walked into the first huge mansion and asked if I could rent a room?

The attendant, a man with a nose like a Nobody Lance, stared at me.

Then he sniffed. I could practically feel the wind rush in as he stared at me. It was the way my mom used to look when I had come home dripping wet as she was having a cocktail party.

I would say 'Er.'

She would sniff.

The 'Er' conveyed 'Sorry' and the sniff conveyed 'You are my child so we have to pretend this never happened right now but oh the things your father is going to do when he steps out of the party'. Point was, the sniff conveyed: 'You are NOT the sort of person we want here'.

Donald sniffed like that too, the first time we met. I couldn't figure out how something that squawky and irritating could place higher in Sora's affections than I could and was just trying to figure out when the thing had sniffed.

The worst thing was, Sora had _reacted _to the sniff. Those things had more of a hold on him then I did.

Was I slipping into Digressionville again? The attendant was glaring at me. Yes, yes I was.

"Hey, can I get a room?" I asked. He reminded me of mom far too much to be normal. Hadn't she had a brother who went into the hotel business…?

"Ahem." It was like a hurricane coughing politely. "I don't believe there are any vacancies at this time, but if you would care to come back in approximately—" He looked me up and down. "Four or five years, I'm sure we can accommodate you with _something_."

"So I'll just sleep on your doorstep until them, all right?" The comeback was immediate. So was the reaction. Fighting a grin was hard when you see a guy with a stick up his butt have it yanked out suddenly. He collapsed like Jell-O.

"No, that is not "a'ight"!"

A'ight? I hadn't said 'a'ight'. What the heck did that mean? It would just be my luck if this guy was on crack. I mean really. Who used 'a'ight' aside from Wakka and his crony Tidus? Oh who cared. My threat was working. Score one for Riku.

"Then give me a room."

"Our rooms are all full." The attendant said uncomfortably. "Booked solid, I swear."

Well, as long as you're _swearing_, that's all right then, because I know you're _so_ trustworthy and unprejudiced. The keyblade's fidgeting and my hand's starting to bristle with unhappy electricity. But, while whipping it out may have gotten me food, I don't think an armed guest is going to be quite so welcome in a hotel. From what Kairi used to tell me, they're respectable places.

She should know, she was in a lot of them before she ever ended up on our island.

But the thing she told me most was that you needed munny to get rooms. I have no munny. This is a problem.

"Then tell me where to go."

The guy stares at me, blinks rapidly, and then straightens sharply. The stick has been shoved back up his you-know-what.

"I can recommend a few hotels that _might_ be within your price range—"

"No."

He stares at me again and it starts to get on my nerves.

"I need somewhere free."

The stare turns into a laugh.

"Free? In this town? With the conventions here? You're insane! Er," He stopped abruptly as an even more stick-up-his man walked into the room. My attendant's voice did a one-eighty.

"You see, there are hundreds of lodgings available to your price range, but we are regrettably full for the night. We hope you've enjoyed your stay and will come again." Pushing a brochure into my hands, he ushered me out the door where I stood, again in the sunlight, with a pamphlet telling me about the 'luscious' rooms I wouldn't be staying in tonight.

I should've gotten the jerk fired. I would have too, if I had had more energy but as it was, I was running on empty. The redhead food of four hours ago was long gone now and I hadn't made any progress in finding a hotel.

Looks like it was a shiny portal (if I could find one, I hadn't seen any yet) or a convenient rooftop for me tonight.

Problem was, they all seemed to be slanted…

Eventually, I ended up on the back roof of the Wendy's, lying on my back and staring up at the still-lit sky. It smelled good there and if I ended up having to rummage through the dumpsters…

I was going around the bend. This body did nothing for me, except demand that it could eat, sleep, and generate some kind of weird density and gravity that made normal movement a hazard and bloody pain in the butt.

Kingdom Hearts was starting to sound good, which I never thought would happen. True, there was no food in Kingdom Hearts, but if I didn't find money, there would be no food here either. At least there I didn't feel exhausted.

…against all the irrational screamings of my body for food (what? I'd already eaten today and I'd been surviving off of moss for months. Shut up body, ya liar.), I couldn't think of anything but Kairi.

Kairi, and her being here with me instead of with Sora, wherever the hero of the millennium was gallivanting off to now. She'd grown, the last time I saw her, and I don't mean anatomically. Though she did, a bit…

Shouldn't be thinking that about Kairi. I was from the Disney Universe after all. Mickey would have a fit. I snickered evilly.

I could just see him, indignantly squeaking with that ridiculous high-pitched voice: _"What do you think you're thinking about? Kairi doesn't deserve that! She's a brave girl with a strong heart and she doesn't need your-your-"_ He searched for a word, a phrase to convey the evil that was my mental processes.

"_Your deviant urges!"_

I howled.

Yes, it was sad to laugh at your own mental images but I could just SEE him, right there, _squeaking _at me like some demented monarchical chew toy, furious and indignant and ever so happily married with a wife that was waiting patiently for him to come home and sweep her off her feet.

All at once, I wanted to be Mickey. The bugger had it all. He'd come into his inheritance without running off and helping darkness in order to save his girlfriend (Mickey: 1, Riku: 0), he'd made friends that he didn't try to kill on a regular basis (Mickey: 2, Riku: 0), he wore stupid-looking gloves (Mickey: 1, Riku: 0. My gloves are awesome), and he had a girl (female mouse, whatever) hopelessly in love with him. Mickey: 2, Riku: nil.

Just once, I wanted to win.

The girl, the keyblade, the world saving medal, whatever. Just once, I wanted to really win.

"--llo?"

I hadn't heard the voice calling over my reverie. Sloth had been having too much fun reminding me of how exhausted I was and how carefully I had to perch on the slanted roof of the Wendy's to avoid certain death.

But the voice put everything on hold.

"Hello?"

My heart started to choke, died, and revived itself, all in the time it took me to fall off the roof and crash, once again, into the my new and fast becoming my best friend, the dumpster. I was starting to hate those things. I clambered out of the box and fell, again. This world was just not working for me. Not at all.

"Hello!" I yelled back excitedly. Riku, excited? I fought every screaming instinct to run towards the voice. I looked like a homeless person.

Primp Riku!

Trying to brush my hair into non-Sephiroth locks in the dark failed. There was no time (or place, or money) for a quick shower and a splash of cologne. Man, I had barely known what cologne was when I left home, but Mickey taught me a lot, as did Hook's daily toilette that I had had to watch, lodging in his cabin as I had been.

"Where are you?" The voice called, sweetly, innocently, out of the darkness.

I leaned casually against the dumpster and tried to look… cool.

"Over here."

She skipped up; all impossibly skinny, redheaded, blue-eyed little bundle of Kairi that she was, like a thousand little fireflies all agreeing to fly together, just for a little while. Disregarding the questions of 'why was she here', 'where's Sora?', and 'did it hurt when you fell from heaven?', I grinned at her and repressed every urge to wrap her up in a teenage-girl-Sora-reminiscent hug.

"Hey, how's it going?"

Her first comment, the first thing I got from that beautiful little mouth? A perfect giggle. And then?

"Geez Riku. You smell _awful_."

That was about the time I started waiting to wake up. This was a nightmare cloaked in an angel. It would just be a matter of time.

Dream-Kairi had moved on to other topics however.

"I'm so glad to see you though! Where are we? Have you seen Sora? You know, I've been really hungry ever since I got here, do you have any food? Where were you all that time? How'd you get out of that door… thing?" The torrent of questions didn't slow even as she circled me, investigating me like a cat would a new plaything.

"You look really different. Did you get taller? You must be six feet!" Reaching up, she tried to measure with her hand, standing on the tiptoes of her tennis shoes. I pushed the hand away. It felt real. She stared at me, a trace of concern flitting across Dream-Kairi's face.

"Why aren't you saying anything, Riku?"

"Stop saying my name. If this is a dream, I don't want it to sound like you."

Yes Riku. That's a good idea. Because when you wake up, you know the real Kairi is going to be right there, waiting for you with open arms, right? Oh wait, no she isn't. Wake up kid, this is the best you're going to get!

Dung, my craptastic party member, had finally chimed in with his two cents about the dream. But just like Kairi didn't deserve my 'deviant urges', she didn't deserve to show up in this hellish world in my dreams.

"But… it's not a dream." Dream-Kairi said.

I could hear hurt in her voice and I didn't want to. I didn't want to feel like I'd stabbed something. Not hearing this, la la la la la, dreams suck and all that, insert lame anecdote, and please go away Kairi before you turn into Ansem and we decide to fight each other with darkness and play organ with Riku's vocal chords.

Ever heard of Phantom of the Opera? Never let a crazy guy who enjoys that musical get a hold of your vocal chords. At least the people in the musical could _sing_. I was having Phantom-themed nightmares for months, in addition to all the other nightmares I got to have… that Kairi didn't need to be a part of.

"Riku—"

Dream-Kairi reached out and grabbed my hand. Her touch crackled with fiery electricity straight through to my bone and I wanted nothing more than to stay there forever and never wake up.

"Riku, this is real." She told me.

"No it's not."

I yanked my hand away.

"You're not, it's not, and I barely am." I continued. "So piss off."

And I walked away. Pride took a backseat to shame after I'd gotten about fifty feet and felt guilty enough to look back. Dream-Kairi stood there, glowing in that Kairi-ish way but shivering and lonely-looking. You could generate roughly the same effect by half-drowning a kitten, pulling it out of the water, and then throwing it in front of a pack of angry dogs. All you had to do was wait for the moment of the helpless, hopeless 'myao?' and take a photo.

That was what Dream-Kairi looked like.

Obviously, I stopped walking and turned around. There was no happy gasp of relief or relieved 'Riku!' in response to my stopping.

If anything, there was a mangled, hopeless sob. Dream-Kairi (or Kairi, since as it was turning out, I couldn't do this to either one) wasn't even looking up.

As I've already said, guilt isn't usually a strong motivator for me. I mean, it is, a little, but self-pity and actually… well, guilt's a motive when it comes to big things. Not little things. Losing the last piece of a 2000 piece jigsaw puzzle? No guilt. Leaving only a tiny bit of ice cream in the bottom of the canister? No guilt.

Abandoning the girl of your dreams just because you believe she _is _a dream?

Guilt. By the bucketload.

"Kai… Kairi…"

She sniffled. I'd never known her to be a crier. Sora cried, when he got sad enough, Selphie bawled her eyes out at every sad movie and sentimental scene between Sora and Kairi, and my mom was a complete sap. (Don't ask why Sora is included in the litany of girls crying. It just makes so much sense.)

But Kairi didn't cry much. She locked all her hurt inside and let it out only little by little, shiny little tear-streaks that darted down her cheeks when nobody was looking. I knew for a fact that Sora had never seen her cry.

But I had.

It was the one perfect immaculate thing that I had seen that Sora could never hope to (well, I hoped he couldn't. Knowing him, he didn't want to) and I slept with that memory pulled tight like a stuffed animal. It sounds a little disturbing, but it meant something to me and people should just deal with that.

And now I'd _made_ her cry.

The one thing Sora had never wanted to do.

"Kai… hey, Kairi, I'm sorry."

Hands covered her face and she was rubbing frantically, sending watery droplets everywhere. Girls' tears are so _messy_. Plus, their faces go to pieces. I'm not judging her for crying, she had a perfect right to, but she made her face a mess.

She swatted angrily at my hand when I stupidly stuck it out there.

"Go away! Jerk!"

In complete contradiction to her words, she sank to the ground, still crying like a little kid. In between the sniffling, sobbing, and general 'uhhuh, unhuh, unhuhhhh' which everyone sounds like when they cry, her sentence sounded something like:

"…tried so hard… Sora's nowhere to be found… Pluto! That # dog ran off and left me here… and then you!" Her voice got clearer when she got angry. She glared up at me.

"YOU say I'm not real! Riku, I'm right here!"

She grabbed my hand, which had just been kind of flailing around there, and used it to pull herself up and look me right in the eyes.

The orange eyes.

I found myself staring at the dumpster just as she started to react to the orange eyes.

"I-I can tell."

So much for looking cool, eh Riku? You're bloody _stuttering _this girl has you in such a state.

"Then why didn't you believe me? You won't answer my questions and you've got—"

"I know about the eyes. I don't know where we are. I didn't believe you because…" Oh say it Riku. Come on, just say it or it'll eat away at that thing you call a heart.

Starting to regret adding Dung to my party.

"Because I didn't want you to be here."

There. I said it. It may have crushed her little heart, but I said it. At least she doesn't look like such a kitten anymore…

"But, why?"

"Because we're a million miles farther away from home then we were before."

"Oh. Okay. Where were you sleeping then, Riku?"

Wendy's roof is kind of off-limits to two people and I think Kairi would have a fit if she were introduced to friendly Mr. Dumpster, my new BFF (which stands for Best Falling Friend, not Best Friends Forever). While the image of her sleeping wrapped in my arms presents itself, she probably won't want to sleep wrapped up in the arms of the guy who told her she wasn't real and then told her to piss off. Oh Kairi. Even if you aren't real in the morning, rest assured that I will feel like ten different varieties of crap for that.

"Tried a hotel but they're full—"

"Are you sure?" She pulls a purse out of some pocket I never knew was there. Considering the size of her pants, and the subsequent bulkiness of anything shoved into those tiny pockets, it shouldn't be possible that I didn't see it before.

"I have money." She said brightly.

This is awkward.

Stick-up-his is distinctly unhappy at seeing me again, and now with what he obviously believes is my new girlfriend in tow. Kairi, oblivious, plunks down her money bag on the counter and beams at him.

He doesn't sniff, but he does look down that gigantic Tower-of-Lebanon nose of his.

"Can I… help you madam?"

"Yes, we'd like to get a room."

I choke.

"What?" She asks, looking back at me in bewilderment. She honestly has no idea of the things going through my head, most of them dealing with the high-school phrase "get a room" and the sudden realization that we are indeed _getting a room_.

But for an entirely different purpose, because we actually plan to sleep in it, which should make everything okay. Somehow, it doesn't.

"One room?" I ask.

The lightbulb coming on over her head is almost visible. Almost.

"Oh!" She swivels back to the attendant. "Two rooms then. Next to each other, if possible." She shoots the attendant an award-winning smile that could have tempted Sora away from a thousand rampaging Heartless.

In response, the man just fidgets.

"I'm very sorry madam, but the rooms are booked solid, as I told your friend earlier." The glare shot my way is about as covert as a stripper at a church social. Fine, see if you ever get _my _business again. Again assuming, of course, that we get in this time.

"But I have money!" Kairi protests, digging in the purse. "I have 800 munny, really—"

"Madam, our hotel, while we do hesitate to rent rooms to _minors_, makes a policy of complete honesty. All our rooms are full and you will have to seek lodging elsewhere. There are three different conventions meeting in the city this weekend and you may have trouble finding a hotel, so I wish you the best of luck. I am sorry."

Kairi stops digging frantically in the purse and her shoulders slump.

"I see. Sorry for bothering you. Come on Riku."

Feeling like a dog, I trail her out of there, keeping close on her tail until we arrive again at the rock garden where I spent most of the morning. Sheepish guilt makes me shift balance repeatedly, even starting to be so Sora-crazy as to bounce on my heels. Fortunately, I stop this action before Kairi can notice it.

She's crawled up on one of the large flat rocks and pulled her skinny little legs into her chest to wrap her arms around them. It's either the most detailed dream I've ever had with the most out-of-character Kairi I've ever seen, or she's real. Really stuck here with me, in the middle of some world called Earth, suffering from the same strange feelings and—

Oh crap. She's crying again.

Sitting down uneasily next to her, I wait for the crying to stop. It doesn't. It seems inappropriate to make small talk, whistle, or even move about much, but it also is incredibly awkward to just _sit here_.

I knew I'd make a crappy husband.

Something, anything to get her off the crying jag she's flying on…

"So, we're stuck here. It's not that bad,"

Trying to be optimistic sears at my vocal chords and most of my cynicism-steeped brain cells, but if it can get Kairi to stop crying, it's worth a try. My dad used to laugh at my lies, when my mom wasn't listening. Maybe I can get Kai to at least stop watering the lawn.

"Really. I know bad and this is not that bad. Behind that door in Kingdom Hearts? There were thousands of those wooden brooms of the King's with chainsaws, intent on cutting down every tree and bush in Destiny Islands. I, Riku the Lone Environmentalist, had to stop them all!"

She was hiccupping. I think I caught a giggle.

"I had to go vegan to do it too, because if I had eaten any meat, I wouldn't have been able to synthesize any weapons with the Moogles. They're good friends with cattle and chickens you know."

Where was this coming from? She was giggling in earnest now and the pained laughter-over-crying sounds were slowly starting to edge away from her voice.

"So, after I finally synthesized the UltiMagiKarpSuperDuperKeyblade v. 109, I grabbed a triple cheeseburger, powered up the Keyblade, and let those over-domesticated brooms have it. …obviously, I won."

"By the power of your cheeseburger, whatever that is." Kairi said dryly.

"No, by the power of my _veganism._" I emphasized, equally deadpan. Everyone knew veganism was the key to overpowering of evils, whether wooden, mineral, or flesh, or at least that was the popular theory. "As for the cheeseburger, I'll introduce you to those tomorrow, as well as potato strips. We'll be okay here."

A little hopelessness still remained in her expression but the sobbing had gone the way of the dinosaurs and she was smiling now.

"But where will we sleep? It's late." She says, looking at the sky.

It's true, there isn't anywhere to go. Time to show her the old razzle-dazzle (I'm referring to my acting skills, not any flashing or flirting. Get your head out of the gutter). Flopping back on the rock (which is something no one should ever do, because rocks do not flop well), I somersaulted backwards off it.

"It's perfectly safe here."

She stares at me as if I've lost my mind. Well, technically I have, if the past is any indication, but this suggestion is not prompted by insanity. There have been virtually no homicidal-looking people and if there were, Soul Eater is pretty good at taking care of them. Would you mess with something that threatens to eat your soul, whether or not it's truly capable of the feat?

I didn't think so."

"Riku, it's open and it's cold out here." She says slowly, as if I'm that kid in the classroom who keeps raising his hand and asking if 'cat' has two k's or one.

Our situation breaks my heart darling, but we slept outdoors at home all the time (before the Heartless came, obviously) and we never caught our deaths. And there's nothing better than I can give her than this unless I go massacre some hotel goers for a couple of rooms.

Call me crazy, but I don't think she'd go for that.

"We'll be fine. I'll protect you."

The look she gives me is uneasy. The sting of her distrust (though, come on, I've earned it tenfold) almost has time to brand itself into my tormented little psyche before it disappears into a smile.

"Okay then Riku. I trust you." She says.

Those words do brand themselves onto my psyche. The next five minutes were completely blank as my brain tried to process that idea. She trusted me. Psycho 'Everybody Wants To Rule The World' Riku, also known as Ansem, also known as Nut-job Extraordinaire whom nobody's killed yet because he's on good terms with the King and no we're not sure why but it will eventually be explained we think.

And Kairi was leaning against the rock, having wrapped her little arms around her legs again, and had her big eyes shut. Again like a kitten, trusting and naïve and utterly protectable.

Even so, seeing her asleep was scary.

I had seen her more asleep then I ever had awake. Every time I wanted (and wasn't working on the plan to take over the world to aid the cause of darkness and get Kairi's heart back), I went to see her.

The villains, or evil overlords, whatever they liked to call themselves, the Future Rulers of DisneyKind, had dumped her in a room where they were storing the rest of the Princesses of Heart. Except when I had been sent to Never Never Land. They sent Kairi to Hook's cabin with me, floating in the middle of a vast open sea with hundreds of Heartless and several flying kids in green floating around.

I really thought I could get her heart back while we were there. There had been so many Heartless there and so much magic that I really believed, somehow, her heart could just jump back in and she'd wake up.

But the room where the villains dumped her was dark and cave-like, with the Princesses just wandering around for hours on end. The first time I showed up, they didn't know what to make of me. There were only two of them at the time however, so they huddled together in the corner.

Kairi had been lying on this long stone cot thing. She was always cold and didn't breathe. She had no pulse. It was like visiting a dead thing and hoping, just once, that you could find and touch its soul, if you just stayed there for one more hour, hoping and praying and wishing on stupid stars. There weren't even any windows there, so I just had to hope it was nighttime somewhere and there were stars out.

The fourth time I came, the permanently-peeved-at-being-kidnapped Princess Jasmine had joined the group of captive Princesses. She stuck out her tongue at me, I think that was her only major contribution and she was ignored for it.

The next time I came, Belle booed, which frankly sounded ridiculous in that huge room. It echoed. I believe she felt silly for doing so, because there was no more noise out of them that visit.

The next time? There were five of them and all five were well aware of my strange behavior. Insults started flying. None would venture near me, partially because Soul Eater never left my side. When your weapon bears a striking resemblance to a combination of a scythe and a chainsaw, colored like pain, people tend to stay away from you.

I went there a hundred and eighty-seven times.

Kairi never woke up.

Sora came and gave her back her heart, just as she gave him back his (or however that worked. I never completely understood, or cared, how that turned out for Sora. I was a little busy, oh, _killing myself_). I got to watch that all in glorious pain.

Fidgeting, Kairi shifts against the rock. It can't be all that comfortable, even though there's grass under her. If she were still awake, I'd offer her the service of an embrace (well, no, I probably wouldn't unless she _asked_), but it has already been established that 'I smell awful'.

Mickey never told me that!

Then again, I think there are a lot of things Mickey didn't tell me. Such as the fact that excessive angst and living in the past is significantly detrimental to your health, though he did hint at it. Still…

My hand rests on her cheek. I'm not going to kiss her. I just like the feeling of her cheek being warm, instead of cold and deathly, under my hand.

I've never done this when she was really alive. I've never hugged her. Her face leans into my hand, and I wonder which is warmer, her or me. It has to be her.

"Mmm…" She sounds happy and bleary and her eyes half-open, staring at me with the coffee grounds of sleep still brewing.

"Sora?"

Gulp.

"Yeah. It's Sora. Go back to sleep."

She does, without reserve, and seems just the slightest bit happier for the appearance of her shining knight in armor. I take my hand away from her still-warm cheek, scoot around to the other side of the large rock, and start throwing rocks at the stars.


	3. Chapter 3

Uber apologies for it being incredibly late. I've had this written for a while but didn't realize it wasn't up... has gotten complicated and weirdly formatted as well. Thank you for reviews! 3

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I must have fallen asleep eventually, because when I wake up, I'm being kicked by a homeless man, whose smell must extend to a forty-foot radius from his body. I'm surprised I didn't wake up choking on the scent.

Aside from the foot familiarizing itself with my ribcage, my first thought was of Kairi. Where was she?

Grabbing the foot on its next sweeping entry, I looked around for her wildly. She was gone.

A less-than-complimentary word ran through my mind, composing and summarizing my situation nicely. It's a shame I can't repeat it here.

My captive is hopping around on his one foot, growling and yelling and I look up at the rib-kicker. Hmm, try for some diplomacy or just pin him against the wall and yell at him?

Let's screw with his brain a bit.

Pulling up the corners of my mouth in a gesture I feel a baboon would feel more comfortable making, I grin at the man.

"Where did the girl go?"

"Girl-girl-ain't-seen-any-girl-this-is-where-I-sleep-OW!"

That was me giving the captive foot a yank. If he seriously thought I was going to stay nice, he's got another think coming at him with the speed of an uncompromising rodent king in a rage. Which, I have found out, is pretty freaking fast.

"The girl," I repeat to his foul, overly-hairy face. "Is very important."

"Ran-off-haven't-seen-her-THAT WAY!"

Terrified, he points.

Smiling, I let go of him.

I walk away in the direction he pointed.

My two invisible and non-existent party members, Dung and Sloth, both complain that I could have handled that situation better by kicking the living snot (who came up with that phrase? How disgusting. I'm fine with snot; everyone's got it, but _living _snot? It's something that would keep Sora up nights) out of him.

Or just let him keep on kicking until he got bored and left.

Sloth is quickly falling off the radar of advice-taking-possibility. It amuses me that I still _have_ a mental party, despite the fact that Kairi's here now. She should be all the party I'll ever need (did that sound too deep? Sorry, shallow Riku will be back in a minute, he stepped out to use the can).

All I really need now is Mickey and I'd have my ideal party. But, judging by my surroundings, the best I'm going to get is mini-Mickeys, also known as rats which are, for the most part, utterly useless in a party_._

You can tell because Sora didn't have any.

"Kai?" I call. My voice echoes as I walk past an alleyway and I feel the urge to pause and peer down it.

It's very cliché to call out names. I feel like the hero in a horror movie, about to prance into a dark alleyway to find the doomed (and doubtless intimately involved) teenagers. That guy's always a loser, which is probably why he's the first to die.

But I'm not allowed to die.

Since Kairi's here, I have invulnerability. So even though I'm wandering down this dark alley now, while windows stare out of the buildings like soulless rips in the bounds of reality, I'm not allowed to die.

There's a strange sense to the universe in that it doesn't matter what you've done, so you tried to destroy the world, kill your father, get revenge for a guy stealing your fiancée and sending you to rot in a prison for eleven years (the only guy I really feel has it worse off than me: The Count of Monte Cristo), big whoop. If you have the immense good fortune to have a girl relying on you to keep her safe, you are invincible.

It could be that the only reason I'm still alive is because I believed Sora really couldn't do the job right when he shoved that door closed.

I mean, how reassuring is a fourteen-year-old screwing up his face and giving you a serious Nod as he effectively entraps you in a hellhole called 'Kingdom Hearts'?

Even Mickey hemmed and hawed over that when I asked him if he thought Sora could take care of Kairi. And this is the guy who claims to _keep my spirits up_. The girl I love is in the hands of a guy who gets the recommendation: "Sora can get very busy, but I'm _sure_ he'll take care of Kairi!"

Yeah, I'm not sure Sora knows this, but 'taking care' of someone doesn't mean showing up once a week to water and feed them. People are not plants; they need love and tenderness and-- geez, shallow Riku has left the building again.

On with the search for Kairi.

"---but I'm _really_ hungry!"

The voice is unmistakable and, like a Kairi-driven gummi ship, I curve towards the sound. Kairi has managed to talk herself into a corner with a couple of guys who look like they've been on the wrong side of a prison telephone wall more than once.

They say water seeks its own level and I suppose that's true. Kairi and I are united in our instinct to seek out the most dangerous environment and then… throw ourselves into it. We're kamikaze twins. I guess I should be happy we have so much in common.

"Hey, Kai, Kai!" I say, striding dangerously out of the alley's shadows. Of course, the sun nearly blinds me from the sudden transition from dark to light and I stand there blinking in the scathing sunlight. So much for dangerous. I can imagine these guys' faces when I look up and they see the stupid, freaking orange eyes.

Why yes, I _did _absorb the sun into my retinas, now will you please get away from my girlfriend? That'll go over well.

"Didn't I tell you I'd get us food in the morning? Why'd you leave?"

Kairi sniffed, like a kitten snubbing food and I feel distinctly unwanted.

"Last night you said I wasn't real and told me to 'piss off'," She says, refusing to look at me. "And you made me sleep in the cold and... and…"

Huh? The fact that there was nowhere else to go must have slipped her mind.

"We didn't have a choice." I point out easily. The girl's got a major discrepancy between the truth and the events that took place last night. Wow. Putting it like that makes it sound like something _happened_.

"You could've treated me like a girl!" She shoots back. "I'm not Sora!"

WHAT? When, when, if _ever,_ have I treated her like Sora?

Do I admire the way _Sora _looks? Do I fantasize about sharing one of those idiotic paopu star-crack fruits with _Sora_? Would I comfort _Sora _by telling ridiculous, vegan-biased, bedtime stories? Would I offer to go bring _Sora _food?

Well, maybe I would do that last one.

But only if the food was also for Kairi, or if Sora was bleeding all over the place, or had been horrendously crippled or something in battle. Or if he was in Heartless form.

Die Ansem, once again, for making me miss that priceless phenomenon.

How many guys get to see their best friend in the form of a small, black, almost-cuddly-looking evil imp?

Apparently none, because I didn't. As I began pondering what Kairi had thought of Sora in Heartless form, the girl in question stamped her foot, fisting her tiny pink hands.

"Riku!"

"Huh?"

Greatest comeback of the century. Being alone too long has made me ridiculously introspective. Kairi screws up her cute little face like Sora, sighs, her narrow shoulders slumping, and puts a hand over her stomach.

"I'm sorry, I'm just really hungry."

"Hey, honey, we can treat you." One of the previously silent guys, who has been looking conspicuously from Kairi, to me, to Kairi, and weighing the pros and cons of going up against one to relieve him of the other. He's apparently decided I'm scrawny, pale, and scared-looking enough that there's no danger.

Why do people _always _decide that? Not that I'm complaining. They could just make it easier on themselves once in a while.

"Hey, hands off." I reply, stepping in front of Kairi.

"Nnnn!"

Turning at this odd sound, I see the girl sticking out her tongue at me. Naturally, this demands some kind of response. Does she not _want _food?

"I told you I'd get you food!"

"You don't have any money that's good here either, do you? But these guys…" Kairi looks the pair up and down, pushing past me slightly. I stare at her unprotected back, small and fragile, like a bird's.

She's taking the initiative?

She looks over her shoulder challengingly. Why am _I _getting the challenging look and not _them_? What did _I _do?! It's hard to understand this Kairi. The sobbing but strangely energetic little girl of last night has given way to a girl that is willing to go off with two complete strangers just to get food.

"You don't know if they're safe!"

"Safe?" She echoes. Her lips curve into a smile and I wonder if the Princesses of Heart taught her to smile like this. It looks like the way that Meg, the anorexic ponytail woman from the Underworld, would smile at Hercules when he's said something stupid.

"Riku, I've been kidnapped and had my heart stolen. I've dealt with guys named Axel who thought they could dangle Sora in front of me and I'd follow like a puppy. I didn't believe them. I didn't follow them. I've _changed_ Riku, for the better I think." She tilts her head. "Haven't you?"

_No_.

If anyone stole Kairi's heart again, I'd do the same thing. With purer motives. With less lust for power.

But all in all…

I'd do the exact same thing.

She moves off towards the restaurants with the two guys, who seem more than willing to buy her food. A consolation prize, she waves back at me. I can't return the courtesy.

Even here, without Sora or Ansem or worlds falling in around me… I'm failing at winning Kairi.

As I sit here, again, on the roof of the redhead store, waiting for Kairi to return with food as I glare rather viciously at the restaurant she's sitting in… I can hear twangy music from somewhere. The singer's crying about 'some say it ain't a sunset, until you put a girrrrrl in it, it ain't got nothing!'

It's destroying the dramatic setting. You can't have an angsty scene with a jealous boy-who-wants-to-be-more-than-friends with a whiny, guitar-accompanied music wailing in the background.

Plus, the singer is making it sound as simple as getting a girl and sticking her in the sunset.

That would work well if girls were dolls, and if sunsets weren't a natural phenomenon that are impossible to actually 'stick' anyone in. I wonder if anyone has told the singer that.

I should be devising a way to get home.

The wheeled Heartless I saw two days ago aren't actually Heartless, but rather some kind of vehicle. Like a boat or a gummi ship, except with wheels and one of the most poisonous scents I've had to politely try to ignore since Oogie Boogie joined the Villain Squad.

Actually, I don't recall being very polite. The thing smelled like eight billion tiny things had curled up, done their business, and then _died_ in that gunny sack of a body.

Which, after Sora cut it open, turned out to be exactly the case. For a 'car', as I'm guessing they're called, to smell the same as that, it takes some special doing. It must not smell quite as strong inside, looking at the crazed grins some of the drivers are wearing. There must be an intoxicating bit of power in those engines and what little attention hasn't magnetized itself on Kairi is itching to try driving one.

No!

Must think about ways to get home.

It's hard to focus on that, since there are none.

Maybe I can drive a car home. As the song says, "when you're driving in a truck, put a girl in it".

A girl who is currently off with two strangers trying to get food. Partially for you, you orange-eyed Sephiroth clone.

It's been an hour. Time for Operation: Extract Angel to begin, which is not half as dirty or exciting as it sounds.

Sliding off the roof, I start casually (hands in pockets, feet carefully picked up high enough not to trip in these bloody giant shoes, don't _stare_ at anyone, even the insane ones) to walk towards the restaurant she's in.

I have officially become 'the stalker ex-boyfriend', minus the 'ex'.

--And actually minus the 'boyfriend' because Kairi hasn't even asked why I shut myself in Kingdom Hearts slash tried to take over the world, much less asked if it was out of any kind of romantic feeling for her.

But I'd rather think of myself as a secret admirer than a stalker, gay overtones aside. (And who _doesn't_ think of pink stationary when they hear secret admirer?)

Blue eyes smile and she laughs at something one of her 'dates' says, before taking a slurp out of a large cup, eyes flirtatiously focused on the jerk speaking, who is falling all over himself to try to impress her.

He's incredibly nervous. He's going to carve a hill-shaped canal into the side of his head from tucking his hair over his ear, as he keeps doing compulsively. It's funny because he has a Mohawk. There isn't all that much to tuck.

The other jerk has enough piercings to qualify for a colander when they're removed. He also has enough self-confidence dripping from his posture to put several major pop stars to shame.

Oddly enough, it's the first jerk who pisses me off more. He makes Kairi giggle, the real giggles that usually only Sora can tease out of her, and he knows he's doing well. She likes him because he's too scared to let himself admit that he knows he's doing well. It irritates me.

Dung and Sloth are telling me to get a move on with the mission.

Which really makes no sense, since Kairi is all the party I ever wanted and you can't have more than three people in a party. Self-eradicating party members. Wow.

I open the door and walk to her booth. Nervous Jerk looks up, surprised in the middle of some story that required his hands to be three feet apart and six inches from Kairi's face. Arrogant Jerk doesn't really move, just rolls his head. Eighteen different piercings jangle. I radiate menace. I'm very good at it.

Don't mess with the kamikaze Riku boys.

"Kairi, are you done? We can go."

"What? But Riku—"

"Yeah, Ri-ku, we're not done. What are you, her brother?" Arrogant Jerk says, taking his foot off the bench. "It's not like we're not paying her for her time. Why don't you go sit in the car or something, since you're obviously not here to buy the lady food."

Now I'm having an entirely different mental conversation, this time, again, with everyone's favorite mouse, who seems to jump in and out of my party depending on ethical issues of the moment:

Me: 'No one will notice, it's just one missing thug in a world of lots of people, no one will know, LET ME KILL HIM.'

_Him: "Buddy, that's murder! We don't kill people! It doesn't solve anything!"_

Me: 'But it would solve something very very easily for me right now…'

_Him: "Come on pal, you can do this. Think of some other excuse!"_

I dredge through my mind, trying to find the easiest, most plausible, cheapest thing possible…

"Wouldn't Sora be upset?"

Kairi looks up at me then stares at the ceiling for a few long seconds before her shoulders drop slightly and the clear blue eyes are filled with remorse.

"You're right." She says quietly, and stands, much to the disappointment of Nervous Guy. He's losing his catch and he's all too aware of it.

"But—the enchilada story! You won't even know how it ends!" He says in desperation, again gesturing at just _how big_ this thing was.

What an enchilada is, I have no idea. It sounds like an animal.

Kairi gives him a look that says she will have to suffer forever not knowing the end of his story. I wonder if he actually told her what an enchilada _is_, or why he would need a giant one. Is it some kind of weapon? I had assumed cars were the weapon of choice here…

Who needs a keyblade when you can have someone immobilized and possibly dead simply by running into them?

Apparently, enchiladas can do a better job of it.

As we walk out of the restaurant, leaving the scent of oil and grease behind us, Kairi is almost hissing with anger, like a forgotten teapot screaming in the kitchen. A storm is pending…

"What did you do that for? I was trying to get money!"

"By selling yourself out for dates? There are other ways."

"You weren't finding them. And why did you mention Sora?" She squints and rubs furiously at her eyes. "If I hadn't wandered into that stupid, _stupid _portal, I would be with him now!"

Instead of here, with the idiot who pulls you out of dates, mentions your pseudo-boyfriend on another world, and is currently suspecting that it may be your time of the month. I could write a book and call it 'Things to Never Say to Kairi'.

It'd be a niche-market book, obviously.

"Well?" She asks, looking at me expectantly. Operation: Extract Angel has succeeded, now to begin Operation: Extract Self from Huge Pile of Feces.

"What's your plan Riku? You don't want me doing anything like selling myself for dates, or anything that would hurt Sora, but I don't think I can really get a job here. Nothing gives out money and you can't just hit things…" She trails off into contemplation. Then, hesitantly:

"Can you even summon a keyblade here?"

"Yeah."

Not that it does us much good, but at least it's there. We stand, looking at the city, which unfolds around us like giant bat wings covering the earth.

A bat carrying various restaurants, clothing stores, and the occasional random rock garden, that is. And cars.

Speaking of which…

"We could get a car." I mention hopefully. The look she sends me could curl Ansem's hair.

"You can't drive."

"I can learn."

"We can't just steal one! It's unethical Riku!" Her fists tighten and quiver slightly; she's really angry. Helpless anger. Normally, I'd feel a rush of pity right now, but the expectation that I'd be one for 'ethics' half annoys me.

It's like she thinks I'm Sora.

"Maybe stealing a car is our only chance to get back home! You want to see Sora again, don't you?"

"Stop mentioning him!" She snaps. Now she's desperate. Her body language screams that she knows going on a date with two strangers wasn't staying true to Sora (true to Sora? Are they an item? I half believed I was making it up), but it also screams: 'I was hungry, it's totally justified!'.

"Yes! Yes, I want to see Sora more than anything in the world! I wanted to find him but I ended up finding you and I want to go home together to him! If we crash in a car, there's no way of doing that!"

Ohhhhh.

So that's my role.

She was never looking for me. I am an accidental method to Sora. I am a perk that she found while searching for Sora that she will show off to Sora so they can have happy fun time.

Or she could just be stressed and scared and alone and willing to take out her pain at anything at the current moment.

But since when have I been that understanding? I have a reputation to uphold.

"I'll get us a car."

"But you can't-"

"I'll get us a car and we'll figure out how to drive it." I repeat. She sighs overdramatically.

"We never even finished a raft. What are we going to do with something that looks and smells like _that_?" She indicates the busy road where various makes of cars whiz by, their operators doing everything from eating to staring and typing on tiny black plastic cases.

"We don't have to build it this time. I swear, I'll get you back home."

And even as I say it, it becomes reality. There was never any alternative to going back home, it was only a question of when.

After all, what's home for me? Orange eyes, near skeletal-figure, nasty-keyblade-summoning abilities… my parents wouldn't recognize me and at the moment, that's a good thing.

But one thing has rankled at me for far too long and I should ask her now, while we're in the near-post-serious lull of conversation.

"Would you have pushed off that raft without me if you hadn't been taken?" I ask without turning to face her.

The picture of them sitting on the tree trunk, swinging their legs and chatting, still burns in my mind. Kairi leans closer to Sora, the little brat oblivious to the romantic overturns, and she calmly suggests pushing the raft off with 'just the two of us, without Riku' the next day.

Since the knife of that suggestion was never fully pulled out, I just wonder if she'll twist it now. The silence that follows my question is far too long to be accidental.

Glancing back at her, I see her staring at me.

"What?" I mutter.

"You remember that?" She says, in a voice that makes wind whistling through gargoyles seem noisy.

"Yeah. I remember a lot of things."

Faces, names, memories… ironically, memory becomes sharper in darkness. You train it to conjure up what you need and whip it into shape until you're certain, _certain _that you won't forget a face, an expression, a moment, that you may never get back. I remember that day.

"Well…" She begins, in a voice that suggests that her answer comes plumbed from the depths of that bright soul.

Come on, out with it woman! Because she is. Or she's halfway there at least. She's a girl-woman, developed physically and mostly mentally, at least enough to make me feel stupid and childish and at the same time all knowing.

Riku wants to show off and she's not giving him the chance, because she knows things now too.

"If I knew, if I knew that you would be like this, that you would be bitter and mean and unhappy and not wanting to come home… then yes."

Oh.

… I should say something cliché here, like 'I didn't know the heart made such a loud crack when it breaks' or 'the sky never looked so gray before', but nothing comes to mind.

Everything's gone but the image of Kairi and Sora, sailing away in each other's arms. If the image pulls back a bit, we can see an angst-ridden Riku sitting on the shore, having Selphie hit him over the head with her jump-rope.

If that's not romantic, I don't know what is.

Now to find a car.


	4. Chapter 4

People don't like parting with cars.

I had an easier time stealing Maleficent's pointy hat (and yes, it is a hat). That woman does not sleep, which means the only time I could accept Hook's dare and take the darn thing was while she was washing her hair (she has hair too).

The main reason is that people don't leave their cars open. First I had to figure out where the handles were, then that they wouldn't open for me, then that bashing the car open tends to render it unusable.

Which is why I'm now sitting in a barred cell with two unconscious thugs lying at the other end of the cement-floored area.

Kamikaze Riku has triumphed over the forces of idiocy by joining them. I have no idea where Kairi is, or if she's even aware that I'm no longer participating in the "land of the free and home of the brave" propaganda.

Someone jokingly cited that at me when I came in (read "came in" as "was escorted in by several men with thick black boomerangs that bear a suspicious resemblance to the ones used by pirates) and I didn't get it then. After staring at a recruitment poster for the ARMY for the better part of an hour, having nothing better to do, I realized that that must be this country's slogan.

I hope Kairi's okay. That's also what I've been staring at mentally for the better part of an hour. Where she is, what she's doing, if she paired up with Mohawk and Enchilada again, and whether or not she's happy that I'm gone.

Strike that last one. I haven't been wondering that at all.

The 'police' explained my 'rights' to me as I came in, then grew suspiciously quiet when they realized I didn't have any identification and didn't live in this country. They started whispering about 'mentally incompetent' and/or 'aliens', but then started chattering about how aliens wouldn't be able to speak English so well and where was my bicycle and did I want to phone home. They were still yucking it up about something when I was led off to the cell.

One of the guards approaches the cell, a clipboard in one hand.

"Reekoo?"

"Riku. Yeah." When they're pronouncing my name like _that_, it's not surprising they think I'm an alien.

"You have a visitor." The guard announces, glancing at the clipboard.

The sudden speed in my heartbeat isn't connected at all to this announcement as he opens the door and leads me down a hallway to a wall. A wall with a pane of glass between the speakers.

What the hell?

Kairi, the redheaded angel, blows out a long huff of air as she sees me but I can't tell whether it's relief or frustration until I pick up the black implement hanging on the wall and bring it to my ear like she has on her side of the glass.

"I can't believe you actually tried to steal a car!" She snaps.

Ah. It's frustration.

"I told you we needed one."

"I could have found the money for one somewhere other than _that_!"

The other inmates are staring at me, as if the yelling in the conversation were supposed to come _later_, not right off the bat. Evidently, they don't deal with Kairis on an everyday basis. The one consolation is that they probably all think she's my girlfriend.

The ups and downs of being in jail.

"How exactly do you plan to get out of here?" Kairi stares at me and, if I concentrate enough (which I really don't want to), I can already see the tears forming in her eyes. She's afraid that she's going to be alone in this world.

As if I'm having one of the Mad Hatter's tea parties in here.

"All the hotels are still full Riku." She says, the hand that's not holding the phone clenching and unclenching on the table. Her statement acts as the key to opening a whole host of other panics. A vision of Kairi sitting alone at that rock garden where we spent the night last night flickers through my head. Alone. For twelve or more hours. In the middle of an unfamiliar city.

I may come from what some would call a rose-tinted world (before I got at it anyway), but it was never that safe. Getting out of here before nightfall just became that much more of a priority.

"Kai, I'll be out by tonight."

She stares at me as if I've just announced that Sora has a crush on Ariel. Which, technically would be true, but I don't think she needs to know that and Sora, if I ever see the bugger again, would kill (or try to kill) me for saying so.

"Riku, I don't have the money to get you out. They want a lot more than I have. Cars are kind of expensive here and they aren't happy with you." She says slowly. Like I haven't grasped that already.

"I'll find another way," One of the guards drifts over. If he were more animalistic, I could almost imagine his ears perking up, listening intently to our conversation. "And when I get out, there's this antique store I want to take you to."

One red eyebrow lifts skeptically. "Okay Riku. Whatever you say." Her tone clearly communicates: 'Because if we don't have money to get you out of jail, we'll definitely have money to spend on knickknacks. Yeah right you numbskull, just get me back to Sora and we can forget this ever happened!'

Okay, maybe I made up the last part, but it's still quite possible that she's thinking that. The guard moves on and I lower my voice. Kairi leans forward to hear, pressing the phone close. It's a new experience to have her so intent on what I have to say.

"Be at the rock garden in about an hour." I murmur, constantly glancing over my shoulder to look for the guard while trying not to lose eye contact with the limpid blue pools that are Kairi's eyes. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I darn Sora for getting to stare into them whenever he wants and see them looking back with this undistracted attention.

"I'll try to make it there."

"But how are you going to—"

"You've had your fifteen minutes now, give the next person a chance to talk." The guard has materialized behind me. It's not one of the jokers from earlier and I'm glad he doesn't tack on 'buddy' or 'alien' to the sentence. It seems to be all the others can think of to do.

"Right. Talk to you later Kairi."

"Riku—" The phone crackles as I hang it up and move out of the seat, having it instantly filled by a nervous-looking man with a 'Bourne to Kill' tattoo on his shoulder. I find myself puzzling over whether or not he knows the tattoo is misspelled on the way back to my cell, then realizing I should be puzzling over how to get to the stone garden.

There's one method that never fails. Of course, it eats away at your soul and goodness and sweetness and light and makes you evil, but that's never particularly bothered me before. If I can summon Soul Eater, I technically should still be able to teleport.

Key word being technically. Summoning the keyblade has gotten consistently more and more difficult as the days go by until I have to concentrate or be experiencing extreme anger to generate enough energy to summon it. Summoning Heartless hasn't been an option for at least a day now, and I wouldn't do it with Kairi around anyways.

But to generate enough anger…

When I enter the cell, my two cellmates are conscious and, as I enter, unhappy to have yet another person taking up room in the cell. Particularly a scrawny, silver-haired teenager. The orange-haired, skull-shirted one makes a show of cracking his knuckles while the one with dark goggled glasses and black hair smirks in a disconcerting manner and starts walking towards me.

Somehow, I don't think generating enough anger is going to be a problem.

Five minutes later, keyblade still not summoned and the two thugs breathing heavily at the other side of the far-too-small cell, I begin to wonder if this was a good idea.

Not that I had much of a choice, they attacked me first, but I'm not _angry_ at them. I'm annoyed but too much of me is glad to have the option to beat the crap out of someone with no major consequences. They're in jail; they deserve this as much as I do, we're all villains here, and I can't be angry at them. But when I actually _need_ to get angry at them to summon enough energy to get out of here, this is a problem.

They're not helping because they're not insulting me. Ansem played on my emotions as if I were some kind of huge angst-ridden violin and there was no battle where my enemy didn't have some significant poignant reason to get me amazingly mad at them.

Fighting these people doesn't make me angry. Maybe if they could land a _hit_ once or twice, but even that won't push me over the edge.

"Just a little emotion…" I mutter. Orange-hair blinks at me, scratching at his nose piercing.

"Emotion?"

"You wouldn't get it."

"I get a lot of things." He mutters. He's literally pouting that I won't tell him. "We're cellmates, we're supposed to share secrets."

"Uzi, this isn't a movie," The man in black glasses says, smirking at his companion and shaking his head slightly. "This is jail, not college."

"But I liked college," Uzi says, folding his arms behind his head and grinning at the ceiling. "I had good roommates. We got frozen yogurt a lot."

They've utterly forgotten –or are ignoring—the fact that I'm still standing here.

"Isn't getting frozen yogurt really a girl thing to do?"

"Shut up, I liked it! And he's the one who started talking about 'emotion' anyways." Uzi points at me defensively. How the heck am I going to work up energy when they're arguing about frozen yogurt?

"Is it like ice cream?" I find myself saying. Instantly I want to thunk my head into the wall. Ice cream? What am I, Roxas? Who cares what their frozen yogurt is like, I want to go home—

No. I want to get to to Kairi.

Out of jail, then to Kairi, then home. Via teleportation, since cars didn't work and can't be stolen. If I can just work up enough energy once I get out of here, I'll be able to transport us both back to Destiny Islands. I have no idea where that energy will come from, just like I have no idea where this energy will come from, but something inside me claims that if I can get us, or maybe just her, back to Destiny Islands, everything will be all right.

She'll skip into Sora's arms and I'll… well, I'll have the memory of being the only one she could lean on for a very short and, on her part, unwanted span of time.

"Yeah, it's like ice cream, same sort of texture-ish." Uzi replies. "Have you lived in California at all? That's where it's really popular."

"No."

The identification is beginning to set in now, against my better judgment. I don't want to fight these people, even if they did start it. I don't even want to summon the power of darkness to get out of here, probably terrifying the hell out of everyone in the building, and I'm getting tired of having my soul eaten away by Ansem-affiliated powers.

"I'm not from around here," I press my hand into the wall behind me, trying to concentrate all these anti-fighting, pacifistic, 'good' thoughts into a portal. There aren't many portals of goodness and they never exist for very long since goodness is so much harder to maintain than darkness.

Even Mickey doesn't use them very often, otherwise we would have been out of Kingdom Hearts before anyone could blink. I'm not going to say something lame like 'only the pure of heart can use them', but it does help to be so. Not that I could summon a unicorn or anything. There's an idea for Kairi….

But for the moment, I'm as pure of heart as it gets for me. That's not saying much, when people like Mickey and those three doddering but incredibly well-meaning fairies that live in Yensid's castle are on the scale, but it's apparently enough. The portal swirls brightly into existence behind me and I smile at Uzi and Glasses as their jaws drop, Glasses' revealing a glinting silver tongue stud.

"Have a nice day."

For once, I mean it, even as I vanish into the light.

I'm surprised that she's surprised to see me.

"Riku!" She yelps as I fall out of the portal and she tackles me to the ground, clinging to my chest like – oh bloody hell, like I'm Sora.

"I told you – I'd be here…" My logic picks a perfect time to cut in, returning our romantic scene to reality. Kairi just giggles. I decide that she's been a little over-worried about this if she's giggling like _that_. It's the way Sora laughed just after finding out his huge history project was cancelled the day it was due.

"But I didn't know that." Kairi tells me, sliding her arms away from around my waist and reclaiming a little bit of her personal bubble as she sits up. I've never been less happy to get my personal space back. Not that I can do much with it. I feel physically exhausted. Using 'good' portals is on par with sparring with Sephiroth. Minus the meteors, thank God. The last thing I need is meteors flying through portals after me.

"How did you get out of there anyways?" Kairi asks.

"Er," I glance behind me as I sit up with difficulty. The portal o' goodness has long since vanished and I don't know what to call it in explanation. It's not very Riku to call it a Goodness portal, or a Light portal. Then again, this is Kairi. May as well amp up the cuteness factor.

She's been contemplating twelve hours alone on a strange world with no weapons. She deserves something better.

"A unicorn portal."

Her face lights up, even as I mentally backtrack, wondering if I should have called it a kitten portal. It's like Sora has taken over my brain. No, scratch that, I don't think Sora would abuse his near-nonexistent masculinity this much.

"Come on Riku," Kairi whaps me on the head, jolting me back to present time. The idyllic smile is gone and she half-smirks, half-smiles at me, shaking her head. "There's no such thing as a unicorn portal. Is it a way for us to get home?"

She was faking the glee. Huh.

Kairi keeps developing these depths I didn't know she could have. It begs the question of whether or not I have any depths she didn't think I could have. It worries me that I'm beginning to doubt that I do.

"Takes lots of energy," I mutter, leaning back against one of the rocks. "We can be home by tonight though, probably, before it's dark."

"When you say home, where do you mean?" Kairi asks as she sits down next to me, her legs tucked up under her, sitting on her heels.

"Wherever you want to go." Which means back to Sora, more than likely. Wherever Sora is, that's where she'll want to go, but the part of me that takes offense at that is beginning to ice over, to become used to her wanting Sora and accepting no substitutions.

Riku is Splenda, Sora is sugar. Sweet by nature.

I think I heard one too many commercials sitting in that cell.

"What about you?" Kairi asks. "Are you going back to Kingdom Hearts?"

"Why would I go back there?" I demand, straightening. Is she really that attached to her privacy that she doesn't even want me on the same island? It's not like I stalked her! Sora was the only one who ever suggested peeping, and I'm the one who whacked him upside the head for it.

"Well, you and the King were trapped together there, right?"

"The King left." Or rather, I lost him and continued wandering alone until I came out here. "I'm not going back there."

"Was it scary?" She wants to know. As if I'm going to tell her yes but, against my better judgment, I do just that.

"It's dark, kind of like wandering in a cave with no light and lots of Heartless. If you don't want to do anything else, you can just keep killing them until you're exhausted. Or you can avoid them or, if you kill enough, they'll start avoiding you."

"Were you a killer or a walker then?"

"A killer." Another tidbit I don't want to tell her. I also don't want to tell her that Mickey had to coax me away from killing Heartless on occasion, or about the bout with dementia of trying to prove that I did deserve the keyblade by killing Heartless, or the day where I sat down and just didn't move even when Heartless started attacking me.

Mickey put up with a lot from me. A lot more than a king should ever legitimately have to suffer from someone who doesn't even admit that he falls under the king's jurisdiction or obey orders. Or even destroy the world successfully.

"Riku? Hellooo?" Kairi waves an elegant hand in front of my face. "It's okay. They were Heartless. Better to take it out on them than someone else."

"Sora was a Heartless." I mutter, almost without thinking. Kairi flinches back as if the very memory disturbs her, then purses her lips.

"But you didn't kill him."

"Not for lack of trying." I don't know if that's a joke or not. Why are we talking about this? I straighten, ready to start finding a way to work up the energy needed to transport us home, but Kairi is stuck on this topic and doesn't move.

"You didn't kill him though, and if you hadn't been possessed by Ansem, you never would have tried in the first place!" She frowns for a second, then looks up at me. "Why _did_ you get involved with Ansem Riku?"

"I've explained this once, darkness is very appealing."

"So's cotton candy, but you don't get possessed by it," She says brightly, plastering on a sugary smile. "Though it would result in a comparably messy situation. Don't get possessed by cotton candy Riku."

"Not going to." I stand, glad that we've changed the topic, but Kairi still doesn't move.

"So?" She says expectantly.

"So."

"So why did you get involved with Ansem?"

She's not going to let this go. And this is why Riku should not get involved with Kairi because eventually, after eons and eons, she'll weasel out all his secrets and skip merrily off with them hidden in her as-yet-unplumbed depths.

"His Heartless stole your heart and I wanted to get it back."

"Why didn't you join Sora though?" She needles. "I know he asked you. He said you disappeared after you talked with him, Donald, and Goofy."

Heh. I remember that.

"It all goes back to being instantly replaced by a dog and a duck." I quip and hold out a hand to help her to her feet. "Damages the ego."

"He didn't replace you!" Finally, she takes my hand and stands, releasing it immediately to brush grass off her butt. "He just needed friends. He needed _help_."

Technically, she's right. This is _Sora_ we're talking about. The kid needs help finding a bathroom in the woods. But I choose to ignore the fact that she's right and start towards a nearby alley. If we're going to experiment with unicorn portals, it might be best to be out of the public eye.

Or at least the Wendys eye. That redheaded girl in blue on the sign just creeps me out.

"So why didn't you—"

"_-I-_ wanted to help you. It didn't seem like Sora was doing that." Silence from behind me. It urges me on, though I doubt that's what Kairi intended. "Once Sora learned there was a missing king and he was the chosen one of the keyblade, that was his mission. He cared about you, he paid lip service to finding us, but he wanted to save the world. We fell behind that. You want noble, you want Sora, but don't expect to take precedence."

Wow. That kind of sounded epic. Selfish, classic Riku, no doubt about it, but epic nevertheless.

"…did you want to take precedence then, Riku?" Kairi asks. My shoulders slump and I have to look over my shoulder at her. She stands at the mouth of the alley, fingers knotted together and eyebrows drawn close, concentrating hard.

"I wanted _you_ to take precedence." I reply.

Just so one of us could love her in the right way.

Closing my eyes, I turn back to the alley wall and concentrate, pressing my palm against it until I don't know whether the heat is from the portal or from the amount of pressure on my hand.

"Riku," Kairi begins as I feel my palm begin to slip into the nothingness where the wall once was. "You summoned one…"

"One unicorn portal, as promised." I say, grinning. It's a forced grin, another skill I've had to learn around her; the portal is bloody hard to maintain. A bead of sweat runs down my forehead and I can feel my palm aching with the effort. "All aboard."

Kairi brushes past me, catching my other hand as she does.

"Don't you dare try to be heroic and stay here." She mutters as we both disappear into the light, leaving the world behind.


End file.
